THE relocation of tanneries from the capital city to the Savar Leather Industrial Park on the city outskirts has yet again run into a problem as the government barred the passage of rawhide to Hazaribagh on Tuesday while the tanners on Wednesday said that they had yet to install rawhide processing facilities at the Savar park. While the government seems not to have any other option but to stop the supply of rawhide to the tanneries on the current location to force the tanners to move out to Savar, as already a dozen extensions to the relocation deadline went missed, with the last one expiring on Tuesday, the reason that the tanners gave — only 43 out of the 155 tannery units at Hazaribagh could so far have rawhide processing facilities at the Savar park, as New Age reported on Thursday — also warrants attention as the government is reported to have plans to close the factories on the current locations if nothing to move the tanners out to Savar works. Such a sudden move may leave a negative impact on the export of leather and leather goods. What the authorities concerned need to do is to find out ways so that the relocation is done and leather production in not harmed. It is unfortunate that the government efforts for the relocation of tanneries — taking place since 2003 when the BSCIC, on a High Court order of 2001, took up a two-year project — have dragged on this far. This has inflated the relocation project cost from Tk 1.76 billion to Tk 5.45 billion when the project deadline was extended for five more years and now to Tk 10.79 billion when the deadline was last extended till June 2016. This has also compounded the pollution of the River Buriganga and its foreshore environment as a daily discharge of 25,000 tonnes of untreated wastes and 60,000 cubic metres of toxic chemicals that the tanneries at Hazaribagh produce continue to flow into the river. The High Court order was meant to save the river and its environment, which has so far been frustrated because of the delay in project completion and the government’s leniency towards forcing the tanners to meet the relocation deadline. The government in April 2016 did try to bar the passage of rawhide to Hazaribagh tanneries, but the move fell through in about a month. The court in July 2016 imposed a daily financial penalty on the tanners for not relocating their factories to the Savar park. But no meaningful efforts in this direction on part of the government has hardly been heard of since then. The government, in what has come about, must force the tanners to relocate to Savar and allow, at the same time, the space that they need for the relocation but any such proposition must come with financial penalty. The government’s leniency about the relocation has so far been unfortunate, so have been the tanners’ unwillingness and various ruses that they employed to defer the relocation.
